Out Spotlight XXXVIII

Today's Spotlight is a Campus Edition.

Fraternity from the Latin word frater - for brother, meaning brotherhood.
Fraternities have roots back to ancient Greece and Rome, but today are best know for as social organizations for undergraduate at North American colleges and universities.

While the GLTB community has gained acceptance on most college campuses, acceptance in the conservative Greek system has been slower. It is said that 10% of men in traditional U.S. fraternities are gay — but that almost all of them stay in the closet for fear of reprisals from the brothers with whom they share their house and brotherhood. But with the increasingly larger number of teenagers coming out in during high school , they are arriving on college campuses expecting the social environment to accommodate their sexual orientation and that includes a fraternity experience for some. This is creating a new need for another house on fraternity row. The out and proud gay fraternity. "There are now perhaps two dozen gay fraternities around the country — with half of them springing up in just the past five years — at schools such as the University of South Alabama and Kent State University." (Time Magazine)

The 28 men at Gamma Lambda Mu at Florida International University (F.I.U.) are doing that just that and overcoming a lot of barriers. Not only are they trying to establish a openly gay fraternity at a university with predominantly Latino student population, they trying to show their fellow students that they are just another organization on campus, and trying to get a national charter.

Creating openly gay fraternity within a student population born into a culture in which the mystique of machismo still thrives, isn't easy. Mario Campa, co founder of Gamma, a Cuban American, says he has yet to tell his father he is gay. "Many [Anglos] come out with the support of their families," says Gamma Lambda Mu member Jorge Casas, 22. "Hispanic culture is a bit harsher."

"That isolation, Gamma men say, makes having a gay fraternity — a surrogate family and support group in which their sexuality is accepted — even more essential. 'I never had any gay friends growing up,' says a shy F.I.U. student whose family rejected him after he came out. Gamma Lambda Mu, he says, 'is a different and very positive experience for me.'

The Gamma men have taken pains to spell out the precise limits of their bonding: brothers, their bylaws say, may not date one another. They feel chastity rule is necessary, to prove to their schoolmates that gay men can come together in the spirit of service and camaraderie and not for sex. "People think [a gay fraternity] is an orgy," says Campa. "It's not." Gay frats still have to work to "give the impression that we are just another organization" on campus.

"Gamma Lambda Mu is hoping to affiliate with Delta Lambda Phi, the national parent gay fraternity in Washington, which advises its chapters on how to offer peer counseling, AIDS education and access to online resources for gay men. But first Gamma Lambda Mu must win the approval of F.I.U.'S interfraternity council when it votes on the new fraternity's charter application. The school's president, Modesto Maidique, backs the move, as does the head of the interfraternity council."

Co-editor of Out on Fraternity Row, Shane Windmeyer suggests that such groups can serve as a defense against the kind of hate crime that struck Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten to death off campus in 1998.

That's not to say the Gamma men are not aware of their differences and have a sense of humor about them. The slogan they've printed on its T shirts reads LET'S GIVE 'EM SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT.